— Peter Drucker
"Testing is a questioning process in order to evaluate software" - James Bach
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
"One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." - A Chinese proverb
Other day I was discussing with one of my colleague … somehow our discussion went about interpreting in simple terms the whole “game” of software development and testing. Here is what and how ended up in agreeing on the “simple” model to describe software and software lifecycle …(not SDLC but SLC)
Software development is about coming up with answers (and demonstrating those answers with an example) to the questions raised by testers, end users and other stakeholders.
Software testers ask questions about claims and capabilities of what software is supposed to do, take the questions to developers and project mangers and ask for answers.
Project manager or project sponsors scan these questions and pick up those that they think are worth “answering”, prioritize them and pass on the developers for providing answers and ways to demonstrate the answers. Before releasing the software to testers, developer do some question-answer session with buddy developers and leads (peer testing, unit testing and code reviews)
Developers then get on mission to analyze questions and develop/construct answers in the form of capabilities in the software and “release” to testers to check to see the answers are “satisfactory”. When developers do not get answers or feel that it takes relatively long time to find the answers – they turn to project manager with their analysis as why answer can not be made available immediately. Project manager then takes the decision of “deferring” those “unanswered” question to be taken up in future releases.
At times Testers, act on behalf of end users and other
Testers verify those answers and check to see they are OK … some times there will be follow-up questions or new questions (regression bugs/issues) and they are routed to developers via the project manager. This cycle repeats until there are new questions to be answered by the developers.
So … as long as there are questions to be answered about software … there will be the need of developers (who will provide answers) and there will be need of Project managers (to prioritize and check which questions need to be answered) and hence a software development project …
Guess what … it is software testers who drive the whole thing by asking relevant and important questions about software – about it’s claims and capabilities …
So … as important trait of a tester is to practice asking “good” questions …
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